Gene Lyons is a political columnist and author. Lyons writes a column for the Arkansas Times that is nationally syndicated by United Media. He was previously a general editor at Newsweek as wells an associate editor at Texas Monthly where he won a National Magazine Award in 1980. He contributes to Salon.comand has written for such magazines as Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Entertainment Weekly, Washington Monthly, The Nation, Esquire, and Slate.

A graduate of Rutgers University with a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, Lyons taught at the Universities of Massachusetts, Arkansas and Texas before becoming a full-time writer in 1976. A native of New Jersey, Lyons has lived in Arkansas with his wife Diane since 1972. The Lyons live on a cattle farm near Houston, Ark., with a half-dozen dogs, several cats, three horses, and a growing herd of Fleckvieh Simmental cows.

The “Freedom Caucus” not only can’t govern, they don’t appear to believe in governance. If they understood the first thing about the U.S. Constitution they profess to revere, they’d recognize that it was purposely crafted to frustrate radicals like them.

Candidate Trump and former Governor Palin are complaining about “political correctness,” the supposedly liberal sin of being too polite to tell the unvarnished truth. Have I given offense? Oh, I do hope so.

If one were of a low and suspicious nature regarding The New York Times’ historically inept Washington Bureau, one might suspect yet another example of the “Clinton Rules” — that is, a shaky allegation unsupported by facts.

The swirl of innuendo and accusation currently dogging the Clintons is nothing more than conspiracy theories touted by the same newspapers that promoted the Whitewater hoax and cheered on Kenneth Starr.

What’s so insidious about “religious liberty” statutes as written, and why they cannot be permitted to stand, is that they would give zealous individuals and private businesses near-dictatorial powers with no legal recourse.